John Waters Talks His Life in Parties, Legendary Muses & That Mustache

Waters grew up in Lutherville, Maryland, a small suburb of Baltimore. He attended a Catholic highschool that “discouraged every interest I ever had.” While he all the time sought after to be a creator, “I didn’t read a lot when I was young because we had to read these horrible books about Benjamin Franklin. I wanted to read Hot Rod and books about juvenile delinquents.” Around age 16, he began placing out in downtown Baltimore to “meet the beatniks and the gay people. The police would stop us and say, ‘You can’t do this. This isn’t Greenwich Village.’ ”

In 1966, Waters was once kicked out of New York University throughout a marijuana bust. He moved again to his folks’ area and, later that yr, shot his 2nd quick movie, Roman Candles. The experimental film, which marked Milstead’s movie debut as Divine, collaged disparate scenes, from drag queens on bikes to a clergyman consuming beer. Waters posed for footage out of doors his folks’ house (above) ahead of the movie’s premiere at a Baltimore church. “It was all the downtown bohemia, the crazy hippies, lunatics, and gay people,” he says. Afterward, “I’m sure we went somewhere and smoked pot, because that’s what we all did then.”

Waters debuted his signature mustache whilst making Multiple Maniacs (1970), his 2nd function movie. Sique Stole, the elder sister of Mink, informed Waters to “put a little pencil on it.” Every unmarried day since, he’s used a Maybelline black velvet eye and forehead pencil to fill it in. “I want a Maybelline ad! I don’t know why they won’t hire me.”

The 1975 premiere of Female Trouble, through which Divine performs an adolescent mother became roving prison, was once held at “an uptown art cinema—a failing one.” Despite the serious snowfall that hit New York that day, the premiere was once crowded. The movie’s distributor “gave us a limo there, but not home!”

For the 1981 premiere of Polyester (above), Waters’s folks joined him and Divine. While his earlier movies have been rated X or NC-17, Polyester “was R-rated, so they could take a sigh of relief.” At the premiere, “every photographer wanted a shot of them with the most shocking-looking people because my parents looked kind of like George and Barbara Bush.”

When Waters visited Manhattan within the 1970s and ’80s, he frequented golf equipment and bars like Max’s Kansas City, Pyramid, CBGB, and Area. Through that scene, he become pals with Debbie Harry. For Polyester—which stars Divine as a housewife and Tab Hunter as her lover—Waters enlisted Harry, her Blondie bandmate Chris Stein, and composer Michael Kamen to put in writing 3 unique songs. Harry and Stein persuaded Bill Murray, whom Waters had by no means met, to sing one. “He does it seriously, like a bad Douglas Sirk film track, which is why it’s funny.”

In 1988, Waters launched Hairspray, a musical comedy starring Divine, Ricki Lake, Sonny Bono, and Debbie Harry that become a mainstream hit and his simplest PG-rated movie. The Baltimore premiere (above), held on the Senator Theater, “was one of the happiest nights of my life,” says Waters. “You could tell it was going to be a giant hit. It was a magical night right before everything just exploded badly.” Every week after Hairspray opened, Divine died all at once of a center assault, at 42. “We had just toured the whole country doing press. Every news show had me and Divine laughing, and then they cut to me carrying his coffin.”

William S. Burroughs “was very important in my life. He’s the one who called me the Pope of Trash.” Between 1974 and 1982, Burroughs lived in “the bunker,” a former YMCA locker room at the Lower East Side. When Waters visited, “he had a single cot and was reading a paperback version of Guyana Massacre. He served us warm vodka in peanut butter jars and passed a joint.”

“I never went to Studio 54. I hated it because I hate disco. I was a punk,” says Waters. One of his favourite puts in Manhattan was once the Mudd Club, which was once “hardcore.” Edith Massey, cult-famous for her efficiency as “the Egg Lady” in Pink Flamingos, and pictured above with Waters within the membership, “was a terrible drunk—she got mean. I was always a nice drunk.” Her pirate garb was once her “trying to be trendy.”

At Hairspray’s New York premiere, Waters signed autographs for a mass of enthusiasts that integrated Keith Haring (above, dressed in glasses). “To be honest, I didn’t know that was Keith,” says Waters. “I knew his work, but I don’t think it registered that he was him. He was just with other fans when we got out of the limo to sign stuff.”

Cry-Baby was once Waters’s perverse tackle a ’50s youngster rom-com, starring Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder, on the Baltimore premiere. The movie was once shot in Baltimore, the place “they leave you alone—there’s no paparazzi.” Waters and the actors continuously frolicked at Club Charles. “The cast was so crazy that when people would see them coming, they would run. They wouldn’t ask for an autograph. They were scared!”

Before Waters met Patty Hearst—a granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst who was once abducted in 1974 through the Symbionese Liberation Army, then arrested for taking part in numerous crimes with the gang—he had attended her trial. In 1988, Waters was once seated subsequent to her at a dinner celebrating Paul Schrader’s film about her; two years later, he solid Hearst in Cry-Baby, her first flip as an actor. “She did it to say fuck you to being a kidnapping victim,” says Waters. “People come to me to change their image. She’s still a very good friend of mine. She even came to my mom’s funeral.”

In 1986, Traci Lords, then America’s most famed porn famous person, was once embroiled in an industry-rattling FBI raid that exposed she was once a minor. “None of those things happen to somebody at that age because of something good,” says Waters. “I thought I could rescue her from that.” Waters solid her in his 1990 film, Cry-Baby, and so they become pals. Above, Waters is pictured with Lords, and Mink Stole—“my oldest friend in the world, whom I still see all the time”—at a 25th-anniversary screening of Pink Flamingos, in 1997.

Like Waters, Pedro Almodóvar and Jim Jarmusch noticed their step forward films launched within the 1980s. “We didn’t compete in any way. All of our films are very different,” says Waters. “We all respected each other’s lunacy.” They are pictured right here on the New York premiere of Cry-Baby, held on the M.Okay., an Art Deco dinner membership in Manhattan.

In 1995, Waters was once a juror on the 48th Cannes Film Festival. When you’re a juror, “they give you French legionnaire escorts everywhere!” Jeanne Moreau, the French actor and singer, was once that yr’s jury president. “She didn’t suffer fools. She liked to do the screenings at 8 in the morning. I’m a morning person too.” In 2004, Waters took Moreau to the Paris premiere of A Dirty Shame, his comedy about intercourse addicts, starring Johnny Knoxille, Selma Blair, and Tracey Ullman. “I was nervous, and I said we had a lot of censorship problems. She said, ‘Why, darling? It was poetry.’ No one had ever called what I did poetry!”

Cry-Baby which featured Iggy Pop and Ricki Lake was once proven on the Cannes Film Festival. “On premiere night, you have to wear black tie or they won’t let you in. Iggy certainly ignored that rule.” Cannes is Waters’s “favorite film festival in the world.” They’ve screened maximum of his films, excluding, he notes, Pecker (1998). “They said it wasn’t weird enough. I don’t know why—it does have talking virgin mothers and tea-bagging.”

“Now, there’s an odd little group,” Water says of this picture with Debi Mazar, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and filmmaker Todd Solondz taken at Tina Brown’s Talk mag release celebration on New York’s Liberty Island in 1999. “But isn’t that what a good party is—when you meet people you’d never meet? This is the only time I met Kissinger. We certainly weren’t debating foreign policy. I didn’t call him a war criminal. I think we were just talking about, ‘How are we supposed to get back to the boat? There are no lights!’ ”

In September 2023, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened “John Waters: Pope of Trash,” a 12-room, just about yearlong exhibition dedicated to Waters’s paintings. The retrospective integrated his 50 years of ephemera, from handwritten scripts to a “Pink Phlegm-ingo” barf bag and Divine’s start certificates. “I’m still astonished. That’s the height—it’s not going to get better,” says Waters. “The main thing you think is, Thank god I’m alive. You usually get this when you’re dead.”

In the autumn of 2023, Waters won a celebrity at the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “I’m holding a photo of my parents because they would have been so proud,” he says. (His father kicked the bucket in 2008, and his mom in 2014.) “It’s right in front of Larry Edmunds Bookshop, one of the first movie bookshops I went to in my life. And I’m right next to Roy Rogers!” Online, “someone quipped, ‘He’ll be closer to the gutter than ever,’ which I thought was so great.” After the rite, he took his siblings, nieces, and nephews to dinner on the Chateau Marmont.

“I just love the fashion world. I find it so extreme and so snotty, in the best possible way,” says Waters, who walked the runway for a Comme des Garçons display circa 1992. (“That was scary!”) “I like to see the craziness and the insanity of it, especially the clothes no one would ever wear on the street.”

In 2011, Waters attended a Museum of Modern Art match honoring Pedro Almodóvar. “MoMA always has good parties.” That night time, he met each Karl Lagerfeld and Rossy de Palma for the primary time. Lagerfeld was once the uncredited assistant costumer for Boom!, “my favorite bad Elizabeth Taylor movie. I loved talking to him about that,” says Waters. “He was down-to-earth— totally nice and funny.” De Palma, the Spanish actor and Almodóvar’s longtime muse, “was like a Dreamland girl. She was similar to Mink and the people who worked with me.”